


The Virtues of Michael Scofield According to Lincoln Burrows

by Itrustyoutokillme



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Fic Challenge, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 16:08:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10812384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itrustyoutokillme/pseuds/Itrustyoutokillme
Summary: Fic challenge.No one ever thinks of Lincoln as a deep thinker, but i made him one for this challenge.  One of my favourite fics i've written.





	The Virtues of Michael Scofield According to Lincoln Burrows

_“There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.”_ – Eric Hoffer

As much as people think prison changes a man, they are wrong. It has certain qualities that help you become the man you are when you are released, but if like myself you were only ever destined to leave prison wrapped in a white sheet inside a wooden box, then you don’t change. What’s the point?

When you are inside, locked up for most of the day, chastity is a given. You can’t pollute the mind with what you can’t see or have, right? But what if your mind was never pure in the first place? There had to be some reason you ended up in prison. You didn’t get picked out at a rally to go and spend twenty three hours a day in darkness. It wasn’t a prize, or a curse, it was just handed to you for your sins. It might have been just for the crime, but it wasn’t your justice. And yet, all the while you are confined, your mind clears and you find a peace you have never felt before simply because you have let go of all the things that keep you unchaste. You let go of everything.

  
_“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.”_ – Gloria Steinum

Once you set foot outside of a maximum security prison, you are never free. Whether you walked out without bracelets, or you climbed through the infirmary window and over the wall, you will always be a marked man. That isn’t justice. Justice is the equilibrium of life. It guides a person to do the right things by others and makes sure the world they live is fair and unified. When you compromise the balance of people’s virtues, you will eventually come undone.

The Company. What kind of ambiguous name is that anyway? They are not justice. They are cold blooded killers with no one to answer to but themselves. In the end they will unravel and they will not be able to silence everyone with a bullet. That will be justice.

  
_“Patience and Diligence, like faith, remove mountains.”_ – William Penn

The second I turned around in that changing room and saw Michael, covered in the blueprints of Fox River, I thought he was joking. It couldn’t be real. It had to be some kind of transfer. A sticker. Felt pen. Anything but a permanent, binding, judgmental tattoo. All the times Michael visited me in prison I vowed to him I hadn’t killed that man. And by my own admission, I swore to him. There was never any indication in his eyes as to what he might have been planning. There never was anything. Michael’s eyes were sorrowful, empty and it was my fault.

I was the only person, in his entire life, whom Michael could say no to. Time and time again, I became the walking cure for low self worth and his incredibly sacrificing need to help people. In a way, it could be argued that by not helping me to my next fix, or my next burning drink, he was helping me. I have always had faith in my brother and I have always told him to have just as much faith in me. No matter how many times I let him down when we were kids, he always proved his faith and gave me another chance.

Giving chances was what Michael did best. Taking chances was not. I knew, as soon as the indigo glow of his permanent skin modification was revealed, that Michael had undertaken the impossible. He hadn’t just had a tattoo and waltzed into Fox River unprepared. That wasn’t the Michael I knew. Diligence serves to many people in many different ways and in some cases; they will do anything within their power to make sure they persist in achieving their goal. Michael’s goal was to get us out of Fox River, at any cost and with any sacrifice.

  
_“Charity creates a multitude of sins.”_ – Oscar Wilde

I am by no means an educated man. I left high school to take care of Michael when our mother died. Or I tried. Every time I thought we had our feet planted firmly into the foundations of life, the government would throw me a curve ball. Michael spent more time in foster care than anywhere else growing up. They say charity begins at home, but what happens when there is no home? What happens when you can’t show the undying love for your brother the way you’d like to because you can’t be allowed to?

Charity is a gift of the heart. Michael has a fantastic gift of charity. He is omnipotent, like God, and his charity is caritas, deeply rooted and infused into the soul like that of Christ. Michael has too much love and too much will. His love is his will, in spite of what he shows on the outside, it is not held by his emotions. If it were, we would have fallen a long time ago.

Fox River changed Michael but because no one around him had even really known him, only I could see it. Sara was his greatest virtuous endeavour. She was the prison doctor, there by her own guilty divulgence to help those less fortunate than herself. She could have chosen to work anywhere on the planet but she chose Fox River. I wonder if she ever planned on falling in love with Michael, or if she was ever prepared for his unlimited charity. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but I know she loves him now, and he loves her. And Michael being Michael doesn’t just love her with the love of one man, he loves her with the entire caritas of God.

  
_“A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.”_ – Joseph Joubert

You know when you do something bad, something so rancid to society and something that you cannot ever take back, no matter how hard you try? And when you do it, you get away with it and so you keep doing it, again and again until you are beyond the reaches of salvation? Why is it, when you are past the final resting place of sin, do people still show you kindness? Why does Michael still show me kindness, after everything I have done to him?

Kindness is not just a virtue. It is held in such high regard by religion that it is considered a knightly virtue and the complete, compassionate opposite to envy, one of the deadly sins. I don’t think I can ever remember Michael being envious of anything in his entire life and his kindness has been proved over and over. Since we escaped Fox River he has had a plan to keep us safe, keep me safe, and even protect those he cannot physically see or touch. Those are the acts he finds most meaningful. For Michael, to help another person, with nothing in return is his ultimate act of kindness.

I didn’t deserve to be freed from Fox River. I knew I didn’t put the bullet into Terrance Steadman, and now, so does the world, but being inside prison felt like my freedom. As hypocritical as that sounds, I did some terrible things when I was younger, and some not so nice things while I wasn’t so young. I took drugs, I dealt drugs, I would beat people to within an inch of their life just for my next fix, but I never killed a man. Having the strength to take what you want from another person by any means is not the same as taking a life.

Michael always knew what I was, who I was, and why I did things. Veronica left me because I was tying her down with my seedy lifestyle. I never once used her though. I loved Veronica, more then I can explain in words. Love is like kindness in that it cannot be held with the human hand, but it can be everywhere and anywhere, within all of us, no matter what life we lead.

  
_“Greatness lies not in trying to be somebody but in trying to help somebody.”_ – Unknown

There are only two things I am certain of when it comes to my brother. One is that he will, at any cost, help somebody in need. Whether they know it or not, he will help them any way he knows how. The other thing I know is that he is the furthest from proud you could ever be. I am proud of him, but I am his opposite, so the deadly sins apply to me. I am lustful, proud, and envious and above all else, I have a very short resistance to wrath. Michael is like the perfect, angelic mirror image of me. Where I seek lust, he seeks love. Where I am proud, he is humble. Where I envy those around me, lash out in wrath; he is kind to the same people who anger me so.

But why? Michael hasn’t a proud bone is his body. He is the walking definition of modesty but true to the meaning of the word, he doesn’t show it. That would be proud. He is humble. Before he held up that bank and was thrown into Fox River, Michael was never one to boast about his life. He kept it to himself but used his knowledge and understanding to help other people. When we got out, he was still the same Michael. He didn’t speak about prison, and he didn’t misguide his emotions because in his eyes, he had a job to do.

Sara never deserved to be used by Michael. She had a life she hated, a career she despised but she was happy within herself. She could go home at the end of the day and feel safe in the knowledge she was helping others. That’s where she and Michael differ. Sara has always tried to be somebody because of who she was. Everything in her life happened because she wanted it. Michael doesn’t ask for his life or what happens in it. He didn’t ask for his brother to be held for a capital crime and he didn’t ask to experience death at the hands of evil, but he has. And the fact that he handles it with such grace and intelligence, makes him a better man than I ever could be.

  
_“Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passions.”_ – Saint Thomas Aquinas

I am an addict. I have been addicted to many things in my life. Women, drugs, sex, alcohol and with every vice comes a way out. The world calls them virtue meetings where you can strip yourself of your vice and replace it with its opposing virtue. When I was in AA meetings for liquor related addictions, they talked a lot about temperance. They say, Temperance is the practice of moderation, which means, you can enjoy a drink as long as you don’t drink too much. If you cannot be temperate then you need the next room for abstinence.

Sara is also an addict. I probably even saw her a few times at a meeting, I wouldn’t remember. I was usually too drunk to realise but this isn’t about how Lincoln Burrows went to an alcoholics self help group drunk, or how he walked out after they had spoke total bullshit about moderating his behaviour. No. This is about Michael and how he can have something he as been given, something he could take, but refrains. There is no greater feeling in the world than love. It binds us to a person forever. Even in death you will always love that person, no matter what.

So I ask myself, how can Michael do it? Sara Tancredi is by no means ugly. In fact, for a man who has been in prison for three years without so much as a picture of a naked lady, I wouldn’t mind a little comfort from the good doctor, but that is where Michael and I differ. I want because I cannot have. Michael has but does not take and it makes their relationship even stronger than anything I could ever hope to imagine.

  
_“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”_ – Gilbert Keith Chesterton

As a man of many principles, and a man who has seen a lot in his life, I am a coward. I have never wanted to face fear, in any form, moral or physical. I just can’t look at myself in the mirror and see a righteous man. All I see is corruption, greed and selfishness, but I like who I am. I probably would have turned out this way, even if my mother was still alive, or my father hadn’t left. Michael on the other hand, has never been a coward.

When he was younger, he used to think there were monsters in his closet at night. He used to be scared of the dark because with his LLI, he couldn’t even shut of the stimuli in sleep and it haunted him. But he was never a coward. He was just a scared little boy who had lost his mother and wanted his big brother to protect him. I did everything I could to protect that little boy and the man he has grown into is the most courageous I have ever met.

Mahone is a son of a bitch. His gaunt, twitchy expression and hi smug smile when he thinks he has you in his grasp is just too much to even visualise. He pursued us relentlessly, even breaking international protocol and crossing the borders into Panama. He reminds me a lot of Michael. He is smart and sophisticated and he doesn’t give up easily. He was smart enough to get a few steps ahead of us a few times but in the end he came apart at the seams. Mahone is like Michael with my virtues, but he will never have fortitude.

  
_“Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.”_ – Charles Caleb Colton

Michael doesn’t say much. H’s always been a watcher rather then a doer and it has got him far. He says what he has to say with facial expression, or sometimes lack there of, and you learn to read them. He has the ability to say very little and for it to mean so much.

Michael has always been a vessel of knowledge. He can read something and commit it to memory, mostly on a small scale. I suppose, when it came to memorising the entire layout of a prison, he came a little unstuck after page three, so he needed to take more drastic actions. The point is, Michael is clever. But not in the way you and I are clever. He is abnormally clever. Take this for example. Michael can look at a situation, the same way you and I would, but he can determine the best way to approach it for the perfect outcome.

Before going to war, two nations must weigh up the possibility of being harmed in relation to harming the opposing side. This is called the prudential judgment of war. Michael and I took on the government and if it wasn’t for Michael’s ability to be prudent, we would have been forever lost.

  
_“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”_ – Peter Ustinov

The final virtue I implore to you is Forgiveness. Without forgiveness, I would never have been at peace with all my past sins in Fox River. I was not ready to die because I had killed that man. I was ready to die because I had accepted it as my fate for my life so far. Everything we do has a consequence, whether it is good or bad, and each consequence has an affect. Usually it is on the ones we love, and usually it hinders our future engagements.

Sara Tancredi is, above all else, a forgiver. All the shit my brother has done to her, put her through, made her endure, the very least she could do is string him up by his testicles and watch him squirm. But what does she do? She forgives him. Time and time again, she will forgive a man who she loves more then life itself. It takes a lot for an addict to forgive. They are usually the first to blame someone else for something and the last to acknowledge they have done anything wrong. Forgiveness is for the brave and without it we would have no courage.

I can’t forgive and I can’t forget what happened to me. I cannot excuse the fact I was sent to prison for a crime I didn’t commit and lost a portion of my life. I missed my son grow up. I lost the woman I love to another man and then to the sound of a bullet. I have lost so much I cannot even comprehend forgiving a single person responsible.

Michael can forgive like it is the easiest thing in the world. His only flaw? He cannot forgive himself.

 

 


End file.
